Making the Cloud, Microservices, and Enterprise IT work!

I had a very interesting meeting with a client a few weeks back. (For those who don't read regularly, I do high level IT consulting.) This client has been doing SOA for a few years. Actually though, they're doing SOI - Service Oriented Integration - not SOA, Service Oriented Architecture. Meaning they're creating and/or exposing lots of services from existing big box applications, and using web service technology to connect apps together. After a couple of years of SOI they have several hundred exposed services and application interconnections. Their architects have spotted that some services have much higher reuse patterns than others and are trying to apply architecture standards such as standard entities and interface patterns to every new service - to up the reuse, decrease the maintenance, and move towards SOA architecture goals and ROI. This is a very natural step along the SOA maturity path. Along comes a change in senior business management. They bring a new